Many argue that the world’s research, that is predominantly funded by governments, using tax payers money, should be freely available to the general public, as they are paying for it. The open access model of publishing papers seeks to address this.
What is Open Access Publishing? It seeks to make scientific research papers freely available to anybody who wants to read them, at no cost to the reader. There are two primary types of open access publishing – Gold Open Access and Green Open Access. These sit alongside a traditional publishing model where readers have to pay to read scientific papers.
Many scientific papers (although the number is decreasing) are behind paywalls, meaning that somebody who wants to read the paper either has to have a subscription or pay a fee to buy, or rent, the paper.
In gold open access the author (or a another stakeholder) pays for the paper to be published and the final version of the paper is freely available to anybody who wishes to access it.
In a green open access model, a submitted version of the paper can be made available online. This version is typically the final version of the paper before it is typeset by the publisher.
In this article we look at the history of open access, take a closer look at the differences between gold and green open access and consider some of the criticisms of open access.
You might also be interested in the Sherpa Romeo tool, which we also touch on in this article.
History of Open Access Publishing
The emergence of the internet was obviously a driver in the open access movement and some might assume that open access emerged due to the internet. In fact, this is not the case. Open access publishing can be dated as far back as the 1940’s when physicist Leo Szilard suggested, in order to stem the flow of low quality publications, that each scholar should be given 100 vouchers to pay for his papers (we would like to find a citation to this quote – please let us know if you know it).
The internet was, of course, important in the development of open access. It made it possible to publish online, make articles instantly accessible and reduce the cost of entry by (for example) not having to have printing and distribution costs. Of course, these are also true of traditional publishing but it is easier to start a new journal and have it fully online, rather than change your existing model, which might meet resistance from the stakeholders and may even been seen as lowering the quality of the journal.
Open Access Declarations
In the 2002/2003, there were three initiatives, statements and declarations that attempted to define what open access is. These have been called the three B’s (for Budapest, Bethesda and Berlin) of open access.
Below we look at each of these, providing links to the full initiative, statement and declaration should you want more information.
Budapest Open Access Initiative
The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) was a public statement of open access that was released on 14 February 2002. You can read the full statement here. This is one of the first times, if not the first, that the term open access was used, although there had been previous attempts to make research outputs more accessible.
Essentially, this initiative says that open access should enable scientific literature to be freely accessible online in a way that scholars give it to the world without expectation of payment. It also notes that the research should be free to read, but it is not a no cost model, but the overall costs should be far lower than the more traditional dissemination models.
Given that BOAI was released in 2002, it was a bold ambition. Whether the BOAI has achieved its aims, we hope, will be the subject of another article we are planning.
Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing
This statement was made following a meeting, attended by 24 people, held on 11 April 2003, with the statement being formally released on 20 June 2003. A key element of the statement is the way that it defines an open access publication. This is what they say:
An Open Access Publication is one that meets the following two conditions:
- The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
- A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).
The full statement can be read here.
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities
The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was published on the 22 October 2003. It is an international statement on open access and access to knowledge, following a conference at the Max Planck Society, in Berlin. The conference was attended by more than 120 cultural and political organizations from across the world.
The declaration, similar to the Bethesda Statement, defines an open access using two key points. The full declaration can be read here, but we reproduce the definition of an open access contribution below:
Establishing open access as a worthwhile procedure ideally requires the active commitment of each and every individual producer of scientific knowledge and holder of cultural heritage. Open access contributions include original scientific research results, raw data and metadata, source materials, digital representations of pictorial and graphical materials and scholarly multimedia material.
- Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions:The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
- A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and long-term archiving.
Publishing Models
In this section, some of the common publishing models are presented and discussed.
Traditional Model of Publishing
In a traditional publishing model, publishers publish papers and charges readers who wish to read the paper. The author does not pay to publish their article.
To read an article, payment can be done in a number of ways:
- Institutional Subscription: This is the most common model. Institutions subscribe to certain journals, or to a selection of journals from a certain publisher and then provides access to their employees.
Access can either be granted via an IP system (so the publisher knows you are accessing the content from within the institution’s domain), or it may provide access via a login system, which confirms that you are affiliated with the institution.
To many people, this type of access will be almost seamless. So much so that they may not think about the underlying costs which will depend on which journals you subscribe to and how many people you want to give access to. - Individual subscription: Individuals can subscribe to a specific journal, or to a selection of journals from a publisher. In effect, this is the same model as an individual subscribing to a newspaper or a magazine.
- Buy/Rent: If you do not wish to subscribe to a journal, but would still like to read a specific paper, you can buy that individual article, or even rent it, which gives you access for a certain amount of time.
The traditional model of publishing is still very much in existence and exists alongside open access models. In fact, many journals, run the two models side-by-side, so the authors decide whether to publish a given article using the traditional model or to publish it using one of the open access models.
So, for any given journal, there could be articles that are behind a pay wall (i.e. those that are published using the traditional model, or a green open access model) and those that are free to access (i.e. those that are published using a gold open access model).
Gold Open Access Model
In the gold open access model, once the paper is published, it is freely accessible by anybody who wishes to read it.
Apart from the underlying financial model, the author should have an identical experience to submitting to a traditional journal. For example, there should be a robust peer review process which is equivalent to what you would expect from a traditional journal. A publisher that is publishing an open access article would typeset the article to its journal’s standards and also ensure that the article becomes part of the scientific archive.
If you want to read more about this, take a look at our article entitled “Do predatory publishers respect the scientific archive?“, which provides our view on what we expect from scientific publishers and, as the title suggests, predatory journals fails to respect.
There is a perception that the gold open access model means that the “author” pays; and by author we mean the author, their institution, a research funding agency or some other stakeholder. However, this is not necessarily true. There have been studies. For example, Publication Fees for Open Access Journals: Different Disciplines—Different Methods, which showed that of the 9,000 journals included in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), only 28% charged authors for publishing in their journals. It is noted that the DOAJ does not represent all open access journals, but it is felt that the 9,000 (in 2013) journals do provide a good insight into the issue of Article Processing Charges. It is also noted that the data stored by DOAJ should be treated with some caution as journals and publishers do not have to ensure that it is updated when changes occur.
Green Open Access Model
In green open access, as far as the publisher is concerned, you are publishing using the traditional model. That is, the paper is ultimately published behind a paywall and those wishing to read it require a subscription of some sort to access the full paper.
The difference is that the author is allowed to make a version of the article freely available. This is unlikely to be the typeset article, as that will behind the publisher’s paywall. The version that can be made freely available is often the final, camera ready version that it submitted once all the reviewer’s have been addressed.
Where you can place the article may also be subject to certain conditions. You may be able to put the article on a personal web site or it may have to be placed on an institutional repository.
Different publishers/journals will have different conditions and it can be quite difficult to check. Fortunately, there is a tool that can help. Sherpa Romeo, which we discuss below, enables you to check the requirements for a journal through a single portal.
Comments
Whether you publish through a traditional publishing route or through an open access model, to the author, it should look exactly the same as far as the processes are concerned. The ONLY differences are that you may have pay at some point and the paper will not be behind a firewall.
Sherpa Romeo
Sherpa Romeo is a free service that enables you to check on the open access policies of various journals. Its home page does good job of summarizing what it does:
“Sherpa Romeo is an online resource that aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies from around the world and provides summaries of publisher copyright and open access archiving policies on a journal-by-journal basis.“
All you need do is provide the journal name, or its ISSN, and you can see the open access policies of that journal. Just, by way of example, we looked up the Journal of Forensic Nursing. This is what the result looks like.
You can see that it lists various versions. Associated with each version are a set of conditions, which you can see by clicking on the + symbol. This will give you information about what funding agencies this version applies to, if there is an embargo (which you can actually see by looking at the hour glass icon) and the repository where you can post the paper to (e.g. an institutional repository).
It not worth us going through every option that Sherpa Romeo provides as they vary by the publication and you would be better advised to explore this web site using a journal that you are familiar with.
We should just add that you can also search by publisher, being able to find all the journals that they publish, and then look you can look up that journal to find out the details of the open access policies.
Criticisms of Open Access Publishing
Open access provides access to scientific papers to anybody that wishes to read them. At first sight this seems to be a laudable aim and it might be assumed that there could be few criticisms to this goal.
However, there are some arguments, or at least concerns, against the open access model.
The Role of the Tax Payer
Research is (generally) funded by the general public, through their taxes. The argument follows that the same general public should be able to access the research results that their taxes funded.
One criticism of this model is that tax payers money is being used to fund the research and then used again to publish the results of that research. By this we mean that when a scholar applies for research funding from an agency that is essentially funded by the tax payer, they will apply for funds to conduct the research and they will also apply for funds to publish that research, by seeking funds for the Article Processing Charges (APCs’).
There is an argument that not every tax payer will want to access scientific papers, so why should everybody pay? Moreover, the majority of those who do want access to the papers will be able to get that access through an institutional subscription. The few people that are left, who want to access the paper, should be expected to pay on the basis that this would be a net saving to the tax payer.
We are using the term tax payer here in a global context. Some might argue that research that is funded by the USA (for example) tax payer, it is only US citizens that should be able to freely access those results. But good luck policing that, especially when you have US citizens, who are paying US taxes, but they live in a different country.
The Rise of Predatory Journals
It is arguably the rise of open access publishing that gave rise to predatory journals. There is a not a direct correlation, as we can trace open access publishing back to the late 1980’s (see our article “What was the First Open Access Journal?“, if you are interested in seeing some of the history of open access publishing), with predatory journals being a more recent phenomena, only starting to appear in 2001. Our article “What was the first predatory journal? | Who published it?” provides more information on this, if you are interested.
Given that the first open access journals appeared as early as 1987, yet predatory journals did not appear until much later, it is not right to say that open access was responsible for predatory journals. It is true to say that, predatory journals could not exist without the open access model. In our article “What is Predatory Publishing? | … and should you care?“, as well as describing what predatory publishing is, there is also a section on how the number of predatory journals has risen in recent years. We won’t repeat that information here but, suffice to say, the number of predatory journals has increased in recent years, and there is no sign that it is slowing down.
In our view, the real catalyst of predatory journals was the open access model and the ability to manage a scientific journal through an online platform. As the scientific world put more content online, managed its editorial processes via an online platform and relied less on having to distribute hard copy volumes, this opened the door to predatory journals who could exploit the open access model, whilst operating solely online.
Conflict of interest
One of the criticisms of predatory journals is that they are more financially motivated, rather than having to respect the scientific archive.
The same concerns could be made of open access journals. Given that accepting a paper directly adds to the bottom line, as it will result in a payment from the author (or the relevant stakeholder).
In the traditional publishing model, the financial income comes through subscriptions or downloads. Accepting (or not) one particular paper does not necessarily add to the bottom line. There is, arguably, a better balance between the financial motivations and the need to respect the scientific archive in the traditional model of publishing.
The tension to accept a paper, due to financial considerations, extends to the editors and reviewers.
We have to say that the vast majority (if not all) of legitimate open access journals find the right balance and operate in the same way that traditional publishers operate. But there will be some rogue journals out there, as exemplified by predatory journals, which are interested in nothing but a financial return.
Summary
This section has only touched upon some of the criticisms leveled at the open access movement. We are planning a more detailed article to look at this area in a little more detail.
Conclusion
There has been a gradual move towards open access publishing, using either the green model or the gold model. This is to be applauded, as it makes the world’s research available to many more people.
However, open access publishing is not without its issues. We would suggest that it is the rise of the open access movement that has led to the rise of predatory journals, with all the problems that this brings.
Open access publishing also gives rise to tensions in that some scholars will not have access to funds to pay the open access article processing charges.
It is our hope for the future that open access publishing continues to develop and a model is found that enables all research results to be freely available but this must be done in such a way that predatory publishers and journals are also eased out of the system.